Presenting is not most people’s favourite thing to do, but it is unfortunately a significant part of the modern professional world. While it’s not easy to shake those presenting nerves, there are ways you can learn to deal with them, chief among them is by giving a good presentation. When you deliver effective and successful presentations, it builds your confidence which makes it much easier the next time you present.
If you have a big presentation lingering in the near future and want to really nail it, identify what makes a good presentation. Here are some examples:
Confidence
I know this seem fairly impossible at the moment but going into a presentation with confidence really helps to sell it to your audience. People want you to succeed and they are looking to you to make them at ease. If you’re second guessing everything about your speech pattern and delivery, how can you expect those listening to buy in to what you’re selling. Prepare thoroughly and come ready to do the best job you can. The right attitude can make a big difference.
Passion
Keeping a captive audience is not an ease task, especially within the business world. While the information is no doubt important, the subject material can sometimes be dry, so it’s your job as a presenter to give it some life. Delivering the topic with passion can often times translate into your audience forming their own interest in the subject. When you can speak passionately and eloquently about a subject, it will at the very least help to hold the attention of those you’re speaking to and hopefully ignite a passion of their own.
Knowledge
Before getting started on your presentation, you want to learn as much as possible about the subject you’re going to speak about. Become as much an expert as is reasonable to expect. The hope is that without even preparing a presentation, you would be able to speak at length on the subject. Without having a handle on the material, you will lose the audience. No matter how many times you practice, an audience can always tell the difference between someone who really knows the subject and those who are just regurgitating facts.
Naturalness
Memorizing a presentation can help to make you feel more prepared, but an overly memorized presentation isn’t too much fun to sit through. Presentations should certainly be professional but they can also benefit from adding a bit of informality to the proceedings. Being comfortable with the material allows you to be open to a bit of naturalism when presenting which makes for a much more engaging talk. Stay on your talking points and don’t stray off course, but don’t make things too rigid or else it won’t be fun for anyone.
Organization
While a little informality can be great for a presentation, when it comes to the structure of your presentation, strict guidelines are important. When a presentation hopes around too often, even if the right points are being hit, it can cause confusion in the audience and the message to become muddled. Your points need to connect and lead from one into the other so the audience has a story to follow. This helps them to remember information more easily and actually attain what you’re trying to say.
Time-sensitive
Getting across all the necessary information in your presentation is important, but keeping the whole things to a reasonable length is also important. No matter what you’re talking about, your audience isn’t going to stay with you forever, so you need to make the presentation as concise as possible. Make cuts where necessary, understand what’s really important and what is not and be able to improvise if you’re running long.
Clarity
Above all else, a presentation is meant to convey a message. You could check all the box for the above qualities but if your audience leaves the presentation not knowing what your message was, then the whole thing failed. Identify a clear and concise message that can easily be interpreted and taken from your presentation. Know each time within your presentation that you need to hammer home that message. A clear message well delivered is the absolute key to a successful presentation.